Research

Research interests: forecasting, futures, risk, catastrophe, data, bureaucracy, paperwork

My research focuses on the history of knowledge production in economic life, particularly in the 19th- and 20th-century United States. In other words, how people knew what they knew about risk and uncertainty. I research the material practices of risk management and the ideas that ordinary people used to navigate uncertainty, as well as the relationship between these epistemologies of the everyday and new forms of knowledge produced by institutions and bureaucracies. To understand how material, technoscientific histories are entangled with the cultural and the epistemological, I use methods from cultural history, the history of science and technology, and the history of capitalism.

Weather Capitalism

My current research project, Weather Capitalism: Gambling on the Weather from Rainfall Lotteries to Wildfire Markets, is a history of weather gambling in the US and the world from the 19th century to the present.

When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down professional sports in 2020, weather gambling emerged to fill the sports betting void and soon became normalized as a form of “novelty betting.” Media outlets added online wagers on rainfall and temperature to the list of unique social phenomena brought about by the pandemic. But weather betting is not a novelty and was in fact normalized well over a century ago. In 1886, betting on how long rain would last was described as “in vogue” and part of a larger “gambling craze.” This book traces a long and surprisingly complex history of weather gambling, which one newspaper characterized in 1931 as “one of the oldest, most fascinating and uncertain gambles in the world.”

The goal of this project is to trace an entangled history of weather gambling and finance capitalism that explains how the uncertainties of weather have been systematically converted into calculable risks and also profit, especially during the 20^th and 21^st centuries. The rhetorical boundary between speculation and gambling that has historically underpinned moral and legal campaigns against games of chance has been reproduced by generations of scholarship on gambling and commodity speculation. This book steps outside of that framework and does not engage in time-worn debates about the difference, if there is one, between gambling and speculation. Rather, I consider all of these practices together as part of the broader category of weather capitalism. The book will explain the origins and the rise of weather capitalism.

The book will begin with rainfall betting in places like 19^th-c. India and will trace how weather gambling became widespread in major cities in the US and Europe in the 20^th century through gambling syndicates and lotteries as well as weather insurance and probability of precipitation forecasts. It will then chart the rise of weather finance in the late 20^th  century through flood insurance, weather derivatives, and catastrophe bonds. The book will also explore the gamification of weather in the contexts of computerized sports data, the resurgence of monsoon betting online, fantasy weather leagues, and online forecasting competitions. It will conclude with an analysis of shorting the planet in the present day: wildfire betting in the context of our climate emergency and the recent increase in billion-dollar weather- and climate-related disasters in the US and around the world.

Data & Investigation

Another current research project, Data Driven: Information and Investigation in the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century United States, is a history of information through the lens of major investigations in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It is taken for granted in the twenty-first century that investigations involve producing vast amounts of information including both quantitative and qualitative data. We expect that formal investigations cast the net far and wide and that they dig deep into all available evidence. This project explores where that expectation in American society emerged from and uncovers a widespread data-driven mode of investigation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Data Driven shows that this seemingly mundane process of conducting investigations and producing data underpinned ideological projects of surveillance, control, and reform but also led to complex epistemic struggles over the nature of knowledge itself. Investigations, both historically and in the present day, are not simply fact-finding expeditions in which experts or professionals gather empirical evidence until they arrive at the truth. Investigations have far more complex and multi-faceted characteristics. They are epistemological and ideological constructs in that they frame, define, and sometimes invent problems or questions in need of answers. Investigations are also instruments of power deployed by government, corporations, and social and moral reformers seeking control. And they also reflect cultural understandings of knowledge and its limitations, illuminating how we know what we know.

Data Driven examines both the potential and the limitations of investigations and the information they are based on. The overarching narrative of Data Driven tacks back and forth between investigators’ attempts to create informational order and epistemic authority and the elusive subjects of their sometimes disorderly investigations. In contexts of detective agencies, postal inspectors, Spiritualist investigators, and federal investigations of rural life, immigration, and crime, this project explores how data, paperwork, and bureaucracy shaped a far-reaching culture of investigation in a modernizing America.

I have written about the case of the competing Pinkertons, an early 20th-century battle over professional reputation between Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency and the lesser-known Pinkerton’s United States Detective Agency, a battle that was fought with paperwork, not pistols.

Forecasting

My previous research has focused on forecasting practices and ideas about predictability and uncertainty.

My first book, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), is a history of forecasting in the United States from the 1860s to the 1920s that reveals how methods of prediction and ideas about uncertainty changed as Americans reckoned with what novelist William Dean Howells recognized as the “economic chance-world” of the late nineteenth century. In the decades after the Civil War, Americans battled over the accuracy and legitimacy of predictions and struggled with the question of whether it was possible to look into the future with any degree of certainty. By tracing the production, circulation, and reception of crop estimates, weather forecasts, commodity price forecasts, Edward Bellamy’s best-selling utopian novel Looking Backward, and the predictions of fortune-tellers, this book revises historians’ understanding of the late nineteenth century as a search for order by arguing that a search for predictability yielded just the opposite: it led Americans to comprehend and accept the uncertainties of modern economic life.

I am especially interested in how forecasts circulated outside of scientific institutions and through the spaces of American empire and commercial exchange. I have written about how US hurricane reporting networks in the West Indies ca. 1898 functioned as a material and symbolic extension of American technoscientific power into the Caribbean and as an imperial knowledge infrastructure that linked the production of agricultural commodities in Cuba and Puerto Rico to the world of commodity exchange in the United States. I have also written about the commercialization of meteorological knowledge and the policing of counterfeit weather forecasts in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era–or, why it was once a crime to use government weather forecasts to advertise umbrellas.

Works in Progress

“Weather Capitalism: Gambling on the Weather from Rainfall Lotteries to Wildfire Markets,” book-length research project in progress.

“Data Driven: Information and Investigation in the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century United States,” book-length research project in progress.

“‘New Way to Woo the Fickle Goddess of Chance’: Meteorological Data and Weather Gambling from Rain Gauges to AI,” article manuscript in preparation.

“Surveying “Remedies” in the Countryside: Data Practices, Paper Technologies, and the Country Life Commission,” article manuscript in preparation.

“Towards a New Framework for Historicizing the Future,” article manuscript under revision.